WEEK 4: " ANIMATIONS"

What we were taught this week really made me realize how important is to be aware of online tools, I would have never thought that animation softwares are so easy to get access to. I thought that to elaborate or design an animation it was needed specific and expensive programmes or tools which required professional training. 

Obviously, I already knew that there are a lot of online apps which makes possible to elaborate and share comics (www.pixton.com ), online books (www.calameo.com ) or interactive presentations (www.prezi.com) , but I had no idea about such amazing tools like StoryJumper and Moovly. 

Thanks to StoryJumper we can make and customize our own story books. This tool includes a good text editor (we can choose the size of the letter, offers different typography options and many draw to decorate the tittles or textboxes) and a big gallery of items and illustrations that we also can amplify by importing images of photographs from the net or our own computer. In my point of view I would like to say maybe it is more suitable to use this tool to propose the children to invent and represent their stories instead of just implementing this app to create materials for teaching lessons.

Then I come across Moovly, an online software that overpassed my expectatives. At first I wasn’t able to see its potential but after a while exploring this tool I found out all the most interesting options. We can record our voices to simulate dialogues or bring to life characters (or just narrate and story), we can add music to contextualized the animation and we can also animate items (the ones that are included in the gallery or whichever we want to import) by using and coordinating each one’s playing time. 

At the beginning, I have to admit that it was a little complicated to create our first Moovly’s animation, but at the end we get used to its controls. I and my teamwork enjoyed it a lot. Watching this video you will see why.

I would dare to say that to control this animation tool is quite hard-working, but if instead of proposing individual tasks, we propose a collaborative activity in which the students have to use this software in groups, this problem would be solved. As a future teacher I would use this programme to create material to explain abstract concepts. I would also implement this app to challenge the children to make their own animations explaining or putting in practice contents worked in class, as an evidence of what their learned and their abilities to prove it. 

I would like to say that thanks to my classmates’ presentation about the research of how the implement of e-books in pre-school benefit the literacy development; I reflect on the accuracy of educative resources depending on their potential to support children learning. That’s why, I think that StoryJumper is the most useful app to encourage child’s autonomy, because is simple to control and it can include links and support notes in order to make possible that the children find the answer to their doubts by their own. 

Finally, I would also like to comment the webpage “dotsub” which allows us to subtitle videos, creating captions by using our listening skills. I think this tool is very good, but making up my mind, I don’t change my mind: StoryJumper is the most useful for me, it challenge more than one skill.

WEEK 3: "DESIGNING ACTIVITIES AND ITS BENEFITS"

Along all the teacher training degree, we have had to do many didactic units, in which the material we designed were hand-made, namely, most of the times we haven’t use an specific programme, just Microsoft Word and our imagination.

I supposed that in this subject I was just going to be taught how to use innovative tools to create innovative materials, but we don’t have to forget that new technologies can also help us to design more traditional kind of activities that are still very suitable to work literacy skills (fill in gaps, crosswords, image-vocabulary association…).

I think the most useful of the week has been the discovery of HotPotatoes. The idea of the existence of this sort of tools has never crossed my mind, and I don´t know why. This app is easy to download and control, and allow us to export our exercise as html webpages (interactive use and check) or as word to print it (the solutions are given bellow the exercise). The html option is excellent to share exercises online (on wikis or blog) to give the students to practice at their homes. Its option to suggest word to omit in the filling gaps exercises is very helpful and the option to import images by url make possible not having to save all the images used with the exercise document.

In the future I’m quite sure I will use this tool, not only to create my own material, but also proposing the children to create exercises and share them in order to encourage their making contents ability and their metacognition. 

Respect to this week’s presentation about the text “Computer assisted English language learning in Costa Rican elementary schools: an experimental study “I would like to highlight my reflection about educative financing. In this research we appreciate how the English learning assisted by the use of computers means a considerable improvement in pupil’s learning. We know this thanks to the resources an money that Costa Roca’s institutions have invested. Taking into account my experience as pupil I can assure that I have never taken part in these kind of researches, and nowadays as future teacher I find online more educative researches from Latin America than from Spain. Our class said that Costa Rica’s catchword is “we prefer to build an army of good teachers”, but… Do all the countries think like that? I don’t know but what this research made me to reflect on is that more than ever, as teachers, our duty is to be aware of new technologies and implement these ones for our students although the government or others institution don’t fund researches or programmes. Finally, we can’t forget the tele-collaboration simulation carried in class. This activity taught us that by the time we use video-conference to interact and to check our previous knowledge about a topic (in this case video editor), we can also record ourselves in order to analyse later our speech or pronunciation, provoking a feedback that will make us improve by watching our mistakes. I think that this recording activities must be done every day in class, because children are more conscious about their weak or strong points and the teacher has more evidences of the children’s learning in order to evaluate their process.

WEEK 1 AND 2 : "BEING CONSCIOUS OF DIGITAL COMPETENCES AND TECHNOLOGY"

This week we were more conscious about the relevance of having a good digital competence. During all the teacher training degree we have been told about how new technologies can offer us a lot of options to work in a more dynamic and illustrative ways the contents in the school. But, to use and implement new technologies properly, as teachers, we have to control skills in the following dimensions: Information, Communication, Content creation, Safety and Problem solving. In class, skimming the chart which describes the different levels in each dimensions (Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced), all of us said that we were at the intermediate level of all the dimension. Would this be true? To elaborate in group a presentation describing specifically the information dimension and its levels using the official texts uploaded was a big revelation. We had to clarify each levels presenting examples, and we used these ones to design a survey form to evaluate our classmates’ level.

The result of the survey were really shocking, most of the class were in a searching information’s foundation level.

To elaborate this presentation and the others presentations made me realise that we have a lot of dimension to improve, and if we don’t, our work as future teacher will be conditioned in a bad way. How will be able to design good materials which fit my students’ needs if I don’t know how to search for specific information or evaluate this one properly? How will I be able to implement the use of technologies in class if I don’t know how to solve a basic technical problem? A lot of questions come up inside my mind, being for every second more aware of what having a good digital competence suppose. I really think this class was the most useful of all the subject.  

 I would also like to highlight that I realize the importance of designing a good presentation. We were told to use images and animations, and I can confirm that their use is very illustrative for example, using animations to put in order the appearance of the items or concepts, showing in a clearer way how these ones are organized or where the come from: Añadir presentacion Respect to other lessons and the introduction of new terms, I have to comment that I only already knew what a Virtual Learning Environment was, due to the simple fact I use the platform “Miaulario” every day. I also were aware of the needs of developing new methodologies, literacies or pedagogies in order to implement new technologies in class. Some of this new terms assigned a name to all the general knowledge I had (technologies improve learning, there are common frameworks to describe skills… But what I must say is I had no simple idea about what was the meaning of PLE or PLN.

As well, I found very useful the video that explains the differences between Personal Learning Environment and Virtual Learning Environment. VLE allows us to share contents, communicate and have access to certain tools (we can’t personalize VLE system adding other tools we enjoy using). On the other, we have PLE. A PLE involves all the apps, tools, places and materials we choose in our social context or through technologies (our PLE is personalized by ourselves). I think to it is very relevant to know what each concept involves to be conscious of the influence of technologies in our daily life.

But… how can we organize or get a fast access to the technological tools that compose our PLE? We were taught the best answer was Symbaloo, an online desktop were we can add all the bookmarks we want. I would dare to say that Symbaloo has change my life. Now I don’t waste so much time looking for information or working with my laptop. This webpage makes possible to organize all we use online in a very easy way, that’s why I would use it in class to share materials with the pupils or just to teach them how to organize their projects (in Symbalo there is a widget for google drive).



Taking into account all mentioned before, it’s a fact that new technologies are a part of us, they improve our life. Maybe at first view this statement can seem an exaggeration, but reading the text “Digital residents: Practices and perceptions of non-native speakers” we realized that everybody has a profile or online identity in the net, that 10 hours of the day we are connected to whatsapp or facebook (sending/receiving messages), normally the 80% of the students have a laptop (even mobile internet taxes), we play a lot of games online…

 As future teachers we must implement new technologies (children are surrounded by them), but we have to take into account that new technologies or devices have to be encouraged to be used for learning in and outside the class. We must teach the pupils that technologies are not only to chat, play games or take photos… that we can use it to learn (improve autonomy by developing strategies to use devices). Obviously this isn’t an easy task, we have to develop good pedagogic criteria to choose what webpages or tool we are going introduce the children or what aspects of these ones we want to exploit in order to improve their learning. Thanks to the webpages’ analysis we were proposed to do, we are really concerned about in internet there’s also no very good educative webpages or pages that have several aspect to change to be suitable to be used in class.